John Rhŷs was 36 when, in February 1877, he was elected to be the first Jesus Professor of Celtic in the University of Oxford. Zeuss’s work offered an ideal launching pad for the comparative and historical study of the Celtic languages. In 1874 Rhŷs gave lectures at the recently founded college at Aberystwyth and these were published in 1877 as Lectures on Welsh Philology, the same year that he was elected to be the first Jesus Professor of Celtic in the University of Oxford. Rhŷs was discussing the relationships between the Celtic languages. For Rhŷs in 1877 Brythonic and Goidelic would have been very close before the Roman conquest of Britain in the first century AD. By the time of the first edition of his Celtic Britain in 1882, Rhŷs’s views had changed fundamentally. At the same time, Rhŷs’s views on the relationship between the Celtic languages had radically changed.
